Ivan's War

by Catherine Merridale

  The chance of killing Germans was also a source of joy.127 Soldiers had good reasons, specific ones, to hate these foreigners. The men who had seen combat were exhausted, and their dreams would be forever haunted by the stink of war. Others already knew that they would never see their families again, and everyone, including new conscripts, had lost comrades and close friends by this stage. It did not take much effort to foment their hate, but even so the Soviet wartime press encouraged it. Few writers were more popular at this point in the war than Ilya Ehrenburg, the publicist who called on every Soviet citizen to ‘Kill the German. If you have killed one German,’ he wrote simply, ‘kill another. There is nothing jollier than German corpses.’128 But Ehrenburg, whose prose was at its most lurid in 1942, was not the only source of hate propaganda. Simonov, the soldiers’ poet, joined in with ‘Kill Him!’, a lyric exhortation to revenge.129 Cartoonists sketched the enemy in every kind of trouble; Romanians panicking, Italians sneaking under cooking pots, Germans dying. A pun on the Russian word for snowdrop, podsnezhnik, whose literal meaning is ‘under the snow’, showed the thaw that spring giving up new ‘snowdrops’ in the form of German corpses.130 When a Soviet commander died in Stalingrad that winter, the order was to fire a salvo in his honour, ‘not in the air, but at the Germans’.131

  Strangely, soldiers in other theatres often envied the action that comrades on the Volga saw. Even the men who knew exactly what combat involved could yearn for a chance to get moving, to re-enter the war. ‘When the devil are we going to attack?’ an officer called Nikolai Belov wrote in his diary in January 1943. The twenty-seven-year-old was stationed near Lipetsk, well to the north of Stalingrad. His unit was within range of the German army near Voronezh, but its orders were to sit and wait. Belov knew just what real war was like. He had joined up as soon as the fighting began. Wounded that first summer, he had been evacuated for treatment, which meant that he had escaped the capture and death that awaited his comrades. Instead, he had returned to active service in the grim summer of 1942, retreating before an enemy that now controlled the entire Russian south.

  That Christmas, as Rokossovsky’s armies swept across the snowfields of the Volga steppe, Belov was sitting tight. He found himself digging in, drilling the men and waiting. It was less tiring than the previous July’s long marches, less dangerous than fighting hand to hand in Stalingrad. But it was hardly pleasant. The weather was cold, and the occasional slight thaws brought freezing rain and fog. Every few days there was some German shelling, and then there were the suicides, the desertions, the self-inflicted injuries and brawls. ‘I’ve become terribly irritable,’ Belov added, ‘and I’ve developed this awful apathy towards everything. I feel as if the whole thing is making me as tired as hell. If we could only attack, I’d probably come to my senses again.’132 His chance to test that thought would come the following July. Stuck in his snow-bound dugout, meanwhile, he grew painfully depressed.

  It would have been a different tale for everyone if Stalingrad had fallen. Victory was the greatest inspiration of them all. Red Army men began to believe that their efforts might one day bear fruit. Though many knew that they were still likely to die, it mattered that there was some chance of victory. The news from Stalingrad flew round the entire Soviet world. ‘I long to leave and go and live permanently at the front,’ Belov told his diary one night. At the beginning of November, he had been cheered by the story of Allied activity in Africa. ‘It’s a long way, but it seems it’s also quite close. What a comfort.’ But nothing matched his delight at the triumph nearer home. ‘Our soldiers are having nothing but success at Stalingrad,’ he wrote on 27 November. ‘According to the news this morning they have taken 70,000 prisoners since the beginning of the attack. The figures for seized goods are astronomical. Our joy for the soldiers at Stalingrad knows no bounds.’133

  Far to the west, Moskvin, who would be listening for news through the new year, was also overjoyed. ‘There’s been a great victory at the front!’ he wrote on 19 January 1943. The tide had turned at last. ‘Every one of us wants to cry with all his might “hoorah!” Stalingrad has turned into a huge trap for the Hitlerites.’ For weeks now, he and his fellow partisans had been hiding out in dark zemlyanki waiting for instructions from Moscow. There had been skirmishes that autumn, and Moskvin at last felt that he had a real job, but boredom and physical hardship had taken their toll as a second winter closed in. Now there was something to rejoice about. As ever, Moskvin turned his pen upon himself. ‘I want to tear out the pages of my diary where I wrote about the collapse of my will,’ he wrote. ‘But let them stay there as a lesson in life that it’s wrong to jump to conclusions just because things aren’t going well.’134

  The victory even helped soldiers overlook the hardship of their daily lives. It was as if triumph itself could alter consciousness. Frostbitten Russian soldiers, hungry, injured, desperate, gloated when German troops appeared to suffer more. They seized on every scrap of compensation, every sign that life might change. Their enemy abandoned weapons, trucks and food in its retreat. It was an unimaginable hoard of loot for half-starved Soviet troops. Some gorged themselves on German stores; others fell on the 6th Army’s supplies of spirits, occasionally discovering too late that what the attractive-looking bottles contained was anti-freeze.135 ‘At the moment there are colossal battles going on and terrible things are happening all the time,’ a forty-seven-year-old Red Army man wrote to his wife. ‘But all the same don’t worry about me… The Germans are on the run, we’re taking loads of prisoners and supplies. These days we only eat meat and tinned stuff, honey and all that rubbish, though there isn’t any bread.’136

  Most amazing of all were the new prisoners of war. 91,545 men were captured by the Red Army in January 1943. They were in such poor physical condition that they might have perished anyway, but the state of the NKVD’s prison camps made sure of it. Fewer than a fifth received hot food. Among the minority who did, death often followed when they ate too fast. Others dropped dead on the journey to the camps or died of their old wounds or of the typhus and dysentery that consumed their bodies within hours. Poor diet and hunger accounted for two thirds of the deaths in Soviet POW camps in 1943. Those who survived would face a growing threat from the tuberculosis that thrived in their cramped, unhealthy quarters.137 Things would become so bad that even the NKVD took steps to reform the system after Stalingrad, though its motive was to preserve a potential labour force, not to spare human lives. But every haggard, frightened prisoner brought the war’s end closer. That was the main thought in most people’s minds. The victory at Stalingrad felt like a turning point.

  ‘The Germans are throwing everything away as they run,’ that forty-seven-year-old wrote in his last letter home. He now believed the propaganda about Soviet strength. ‘We’re feeding ourselves with their supplies. The Germans are running, and the Hungarians and Italians are giving themselves up. Just now fifty of our guys took five hundred prisoners, they freeze like flies, they can’t stand the cold at all… There are loads of dead ones on the roads and streets, but the more the better.’138 Less than a month after he wrote these lines, this man also would die. He was no less a victim of the cold than the invaders whom he scorned, but his discovery that fascist troops could be beaten had made the winter bright. Ageev would have understood. ‘I’m in an exceptional mood,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘If you only knew, then you’d be just as happy as I am. Imagine it – the Fritzes are running away from us!’139

  6

  A Land Laid Waste

  At last there was a kernel of real hope amid the dreary mass of promises. A year before, when the German army had turned back from Moscow, there had been relief, even modest celebration. But the crisis had been too deep, and the shock of invasion too recent, for anyone to sense a real turning of the tide. Now, like February’s first false hint of spring, the Soviet army’s westward progress appeared to signal the approach of peace. On 26 January 1943, Voronezh fell to General Golikov’s advancing troops. On 8 Febru
ary, the Red Army marched into Kursk. Just six days later, it had re-entered Rostov, and on 16 February, it liberated Kharkov, the largest and most important city in the region. The places it retook were depopulated husks of cities; nests of fear and hunger, crime and mutual suspicion. Apartment buildings had been mined or shelled, windows blown out, power and water systems wrecked. Uneven soil beneath the melting snow hinted at vast mass graves. The people who had seen it all could find no words for their distress. But Stalin’s propagandists supplied images of triumph. The enemy was on the run, and when he had been driven back to his own lair, when he had been defeated and the dead avenged, the Soviet people would rebuild to make an even better world.

  The politicians rushed to make the victory their own. The Red Army, ‘the army that defends peace and friendship between the peoples of every land’, as Stalin called it on its twenty-fifth anniversary that February, came in for plenty of loud praise. It had ‘carried out an historic struggle without precedent in history’, its ‘valiant soldiers, commanders and political workers’ had ‘covered its military colours in unfading glory’.1 But mere soldiers had not done this alone. Stalin’s own role assumed a greater prominence now that there was something glorious to claim. His wise leadership, his ‘military genius’, began to be invoked in explanation of successes for which tens of thousands of people had given their lives. The party, too, now came to feature as the guide and teacher of the masses. The people might regard this as their war, their epic struggle for freedom and dignity, but their leaders were already getting down to work. The first Museum of the Great Patriotic War was established in March 1943.2 The version of the war that it began to generate would soon become the template for official truth.

  The birth of the glorious wartime myth was managed all the way along. The censors ensured that words like ‘retreat’ and ‘surrender’ would never feature in the annals of Red Army operations, but more cruelly they also suppressed evidence of the war’s true human cost. The victory at Stalingrad had been won at the expense of just under half a million Soviet soldiers’ and airmen’s lives, but this truth would remain concealed. All the way through, and even at Berlin, more men and women in the Red Army would die than soldiers of the side that they were supposed to be defeating. On average, Soviet losses outnumbered those of the enemy by at least three to one,3 but every pressure worked to hide this statistic. Red Army deaths might go entirely unrecorded at moments when there was no time to mark mass graves, let alone to count the bodies that had been pitched into them.4 The pressure would relent a little after 1943, but even so, it was a common practice for the army to report fewer losses, and even fewer bodies to bury, than it in fact sustained. Graves that contained hundreds of men were marked with the names of thirty.5 Meanwhile, official reports understated casualty rates – and also the loss of Soviet military hardware – while carefully enumerating scores of German deaths. Emotions, too, were censored. Grief was allowed – as long as it stirred soldiers to revenge – but other reactions to danger and pain remained unspoken. The Sovinformburo made sure that nothing that was published referred to men’s fear or doubt. By 1943, even the first year of the war had been rewritten for the public as a tale of grand heroic feats.6

  Censorship worked. Sixty years on, many of the enforced silences hold. Government policy was effective in this case because it keyed into much deeper instincts and desires; people seldom enjoy revisiting the memory of pain. The bland version, the glorious one, suited the soldiers and the state alike. It kept things simple, after all, and allowed a ration of dignity – on Stalin’s terms – to veterans. Personal anecdotes, the real ones, began to look as odd as fragments of a coloured picture glued to black and white, and some still do. In 2002, Ilya Nemanov struggled to recall his own response to the grave wound that he had sustained in 1943. Part of his right side had been blown off by a German bomb, and his first thought had been ‘That’s it.’ But then other ideas jumbled across his mind. ‘I remembered that before the war even began my mother had said that they wouldn’t kill me, but my hand would be cut off,’ he recalled. ‘And then a mate in one of the shelters on the way had explained that if your hand was injured, you should try to get them to sew the fingers on again, because if it worked, and there were still nerves there, you might save the hand itself.’7 These thoughts sustained him as he bled into the aching dust, waiting for rescue or for death. But superstition was not part of the official story of the Soviet war, and memories like this, personal ones, became increasingly difficult to recover as the long campaign progressed, let alone when it was over.

  The wartime censors’ ambitions were staggering. Nemanov reminded me of another instance, more graphic even than his own story. In January 1943, the siege of Leningrad was lifted. The city was still exposed to German shelling, still encircled, but now convoys of medicines, fuel and flour could cut through by rail where previously they had relied on a fragile – and seasonal – track across the ice of Lake Ladoga. Another year would pass before Leningrad was entirely free, but relief for the desperate remnant of its population had arrived at last. The moment called for reflection, for mourning and some muted celebration, but for Stalin’s men it was a propaganda minefield. They did not like to draw attention to the fact that Soviet people had been left to starve to death, and the ban on discussion extended to the army. In the spring of 1943, when a soldier who was assigned to Nemanov’s unit from the Volkhov Front near Leningrad tried to describe the siege to his new comrades, he disappeared, arrested. ‘He had mentioned starvation,’ Nemanov remembered. ‘That wasn’t something we were supposed to hear about.’

  Ol’ga Berggolts, the poet of the Leningrad blockade, discovered the same thing when she visited Moscow at the end of 1942 to broadcast her reflections on the siege. ‘I have become convinced that they know nothing about Leningrad here,’ she wrote to her family. ‘No one seemed to have the remotest idea what the city is going through. They said that the Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what that heroism consists of. They didn’t know that we starved, they didn’t know that people were dying of hunger… I couldn’t open my mouth on the radio, because they told me: “You can talk about anything, but no recollections of the starvation. None, none. On the courage, on the heroism of the Leningraders, that’s what we need… But not a word about hunger.”’8

  As ever in the surreal Soviet world, people were being asked to say one thing, subscribe in public to one version, while knowing something else, at least with some part of their minds. The Red Army, the people’s saviour, was prime territory for the myths. A set of stereotypical propaganda images – the noble warrior, the courageous Russian son, the defiant partisan – was being struck somewhere inside the Sovinformburo. Real people were picked to represent each type, for there was no shortage of personal heroism from which to choose, but Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the martyred partisan, or Vasily Zaitsev, the Stalingrad sniper, were ideals, as inspiring and popular – and also as typical of the mass – as sports personalities or saints. Among Red Army men, the hero types were almost always snipers, gunners or members of doomed tank crews. They were relatively literate, in other words, and they were likely to be sympathetic to the Communist Party, while if they were not dead when stardom came, they could at least be certain to behave themselves in public. Although the press selected dozens of private soldiers for star treatment, the style and values that these men displayed resembled those of officers, and certainly those of communists. The culture of the rank and file, the dark world of real men, was jostled out of view.

  Soldiers themselves adapted to this double standard. They seemed to have at least two cultures: an official one, which included everything they were allowed to do in front of officers and journalists; and a concealed, almost tribal one, the culture of vodka, makhorka, the lilting sayings – spontaneous verses – that they called chastushki, and crude peasant jokes. David Samoilov, who observed the men with a poet’s eye for the unexpected, summed up this flexibility. In the presence of an officer, he wrot
e, a Russian soldier would be ‘subdued and tongue-tied’. Perhaps there was no common language to unite commander and man across the divide of ideology and rank; perhaps there was not a great deal to say. There was certainly no time for any words in battle, when, Samoilov said, the tongue-tied private would turn out to be ‘a hero’. The manner of his dying was remarkable, too. ‘He will not abandon a comrade in trouble,’ Samoilov wrote. ‘He dies in a manly and workmanlike way, as if it were his accustomed craft.’ But the price of the subservience and stress had to be paid somewhere. When the officers were off the scene, the same soldier, Samoilov wrote, became ‘querulous and abusive. He boasts and threatens. He’s ready to take a swipe at anything and to come to blows over nothing at all.’ This was not merely boorishness. ‘This touchiness,’ added Samoilov, ‘shows that the existence of a soldier is a burden to him.’9

  By 1943, the army had been at war for two years, and at almost every level below that of the high command its ranks were dominated by recruits whose military careers had started since the invasion. The gap between officers and men was closing. No one could doubt the basic cause for which they were all working, and a sense of common interest was vital for morale. The better young officers, including Samoilov himself, worked with the men, attempting to meet them half-way rather than taking cover in privilege. Although entitled to food of his own, and also to private quarters, Lev Lvovich insisted on eating with the soldiers in his regiment, sharing the thin soup and the buckwheat porridge that they all called shrapnel.

  It was becoming easier for a junior officer like him to befriend the men because the gulf in experience between the ranks had narrowed so much by this stage in the war. The Red Army of 1941 had almost disappeared. The twenty-six-year-old lieutenant, his head full of advice from an uncle who had served under Nicholas II, set out to encourage and cajole young men and aging reservists, not disaffected veterans. Remembering names was a little easier, too, because he never managed to muster a full complement of troops. As a lieutenant, Lvovich should have commanded 120 infantrymen, but he seldom had to get to know more than sixty. There were never enough recruits and reserves to keep Red Army units up to strength. What this meant was that the young officer could talk to a frightened first-timer personally, although ‘a bit of swearing was often the best thing for the rest of them’. Good relations paid off. As he recalled, the men thought it mere child’s play, during operations, to get rid of an officer they hated, just as Samoilov’s comrades had planned to do. ‘It happened,’ Lev Lvovich assured me. ‘Of course it happened quite a lot.’10